What's old is new —

Cupertino’s photocopiers: What iOS 7 borrowed from Android

The resemblance is uncanny.

This piece has drawn a significant reaction from the Ars audience. We've got a counterpoint piece by Aurich Lawson that you can read here!

Reactions to yesterday’s iOS 7 reveal were largely positive, but one current of criticism kept flowing: that Apple may have relied a little too hard on copying other operating systems—in particular, Google’s Android (though the stark flatness of Windows Phone 8 got cited, too).

Let's leave aside the question of intention; certainly some iOS elements appear to be influenced by other mobile operating systems, which has been a natural part of OS design for decades. What the new iOS design does show is validation for the direction in which Android and Windows Phone 8 have been moving recently. Now, the three top mobile operating systems favor clean, simplified, visual interfaces.

Apple's choices may also come as a validation for Android engineers, who have had to deal with the legions of OEM interface layovers and fragmentation issues that plague the OS and undermine what they have attempted to standardize. For many—including me—stock Android is a favorite, and it appears that might be true at Apple, too. When you put both Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and iOS 7 side-by-side, the resemblance can be uncanny. Let's take a look.

Hello flatness, my old friend

iOS 7's minimalist interface is certainly good-looking, but I couldn't help but see the Android similarities as I was watching Apple's WWDC keynote.

Apple dialed down its lock screen to a very simple “slide to unlock” variant that mirrors what Android has going on with Jelly Bean. You can check on your battery life up in the right-hand corner, which appears styled like Android's, and the date and time are also similarly placed, with a similar font.

The multitasking screen also seems to take a few cues from Android. There are only minor differences between the two: the icon placement and the fact that the preview screens are horizontal rather than vertical.

Settings shades

Apple’s new Control Center is a panel that you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access many quick settings like airplane mode, screen brightness, and Bluetooth. You can also select from a listing of commonly used apps. This is much more user-friendly than the ordeal accessing the settings used to be—pausing whatever you're doing by double tapping the home button and then navigating to the settings—and it’s a lot like the expanded settings panel that Google introduced in Jelly Bean.

And if we’re bringing up previous transgressions, Apple introduced its Notifications shade long after Google had implemented something similar into Android.

Full-screen mobile browsing

There’s a reason we pay such close attention to the Chrome Beta browser for Android—that’s where Google tries out its features. Earlier this year, Google showed its users that it was going to bring full-screen browsing to the mobile version of Chrome, which it eventually did with the latest update. Apple also announced yesterday that it would implement full-screen browsing in mobile Safari.

I'm not sure how Apple does its full-screen browsing since I haven't gotten to use iOS 7 myself, but Google Chrome only does so once you start scrolling down; otherwise, the omnibar and refresh button remain in place.

The similarities don't stop there—especially if we start talking about actual application features. iOS 7 remains a beta product, and some of this may change; even if it does, though, Android users might feel a little déjà vu next time they borrow an iPhone.

Florence Ion
Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.

That tweet is weird. It gives a screenshot of Windows Phone with the email sorting headers (All, Unread, Flagged etc.) photoshopped out and then says you can't see as many emails at a time as on iOS. Ok. WP trades seeing ~3 fewer emails at a time for being able to quickly move between different views and lets you select multiple without a mode switch. For that guy to cite design as being "how it works" would seem to be an indictment of iOS, not WP.

They also use the taller aspect ratio for iPhone 5 vs shorter aspect ratio of a Lumia. At least compare like for like. i.e. 4S vs Lumia, or 5 vs 8X etc.

Also please stop using a slide made by a man who has been dead for going on two years now to vindicate your shitty posting.

The problem is that Steve Jobs attitude is INGRAINED into Apple. Nothing has changed. Apple are fine to copy others, but when someone dares to copy Apple, they go into a bashing frenzy.

To be fair I always thought Metro was something that only Apple could have come up with. Maybe they did.. and this is just the release schedule Windows first then IOS. I wonder who is more upset Apple fanboys, or Windows 8 haters who realize there is no alternative!

Not sure how I feel about all the Helvetica Neue. It has a brilliantly modern look, but I really don't think it looks particularly Apple-like, and I really don't think the lighter weights of that typeface are particularly good for readability.

I have owned and used Android and Windows Phones. Was always reluctant to give iOS a try... now that I see I am changing my mind about apple's platform. It certainly looks fresh and sharp! I am looking forward to own an iPhone for the first time in the next few months after this.

We have past the point where design plays a significant role in the selection of a phone. Apple users will buy iOS devices, and everyone else will buy Android (of course, there are the slow children who buy WP8, but they are in the minority).

Apple can try to patent designs all they want, in the end it is the TECHNICAL capabilities of the phones which will differentiate them. Apple's continued shunning of NFC is telling...they wont pay for the rights to the IP, so Apple customers get left behind. We will see how that plays out.

But for anyone hoping that iOS 7 would re-engergize the tired Apple lineup....they are going to be sadly disappointed. This is looking more and more like Apple playing catch up, and that is going to be the story for the next several years.

I stopped reading at "You can check on your battery life up in the right-hand corner, which appears styled like Android's, and the date and time are also similarly placed, with a similar font"The iOS 7 battery indicator, and the date and time, are exactly where they have been in iOS for years! (And the font for the date is quite different.)

Author, your article reminds me of the bible: everyone has a different take on what they just read. You and I can get a completely different understanding from a simple passage. I simply don't see an Apple photocopier at work. But then again I am brand agnostic. Not anti-Apple like you are.

Anyone that would call the new iOS design "flat" has only been looking at screenshots or has an agenda. Maybe, actually hold an iPhone running iOS 7 in your hand before you write an article?

Have you held it in your hand to be justified in making this comment?

I'm an iOS dev.

After I loaded the beta on one of my dev devices, the thing that was most remarkable was how *not* flat the interface is. You'd have to be aggressively unobservant or not seen it in person to describe the interface as flat.

To me, its looks similar to webOS, especially the way multitasking is handled.

This!

Almost all OSes (BB OS, Android, and now iOS) have been ripping off WebOS which is the true progenitor of the stuff that is being mentioned here.

That card based task switcher dates back further to Symbian and I don't know why it's being revered as in use you have to flick left and right to switch apps and closing multiple apps is a pain.

If Apple were going to steal a decent task switcher, stealing the Nokia N9's live task view or Jolla's Sailfish task view would be better.

While we're at it, there's touches of the N9 in the edge swipe navigation gesture to go back a page and the UI colour changing its elements has shades of Sailfish's Ambiance feature.

As this thread shows though, everyone is seeing bits of other UIs in iOS7 which is either a good thing as Apple has clearly cherry picked the good bits or a bad thing as it does appear a bit of a mismatch in places.

I realize I'm going to take a beating on this, but I don't like flat. I love the current look of iOs and I miss the analog tape drive in my podcast app.

Why can't we have customization options and choose the look we like? Everyone has different tastes, so why not just cater to everyone?

Because it drives up testing costs to test multiple interfaces.

Take heart though, because this is cyclical. Look at it the right way, and absolutely nothing of this is new. I could probably have written a decent defense of Apple here by pointing out that all of these come from older versions of Mac OS - the entire notification sheet from on top is like the window-modal alert dialogs in OS X 10.0, the new Control Center is a minor development of the Control strip from System 7.5, and the task switching is really just the original Switcher, a third-party app for System 1.0 back in 1985 or thereabouts (I didn't, because the entire combo really is too much like WP8). Seriously - dig up some pictures of these. I distinctly remember an animated tape recorder in one of these as well... MacroMaker for System 6 perhaps?

With the z-axis perspective thing, I think Apple missed a golden opportunity to incorporate it directly into the UI..Imagine photorealistic 3D chiclet icons that appear to hover just below the glass. 3D Buttons that can clearly be seen to be up or down.